I think all the commenters focus way too much on litography and chasing nanometers. Yes they're an important segment of the market, but they're just a small part of the market. Even 80nm-scale litography is increadibly important, volume-wise, because a lot of industrial applications are on older nodes.

Furthermore there are a whole swath of types of chips for which smaller litography isn't even applicable. China is developing GaN chips quickly, and these are power chips that will waste less power and become less hot.

And apparently building a 5G modem and a sattelite receiver chip aren't trivial things either. Apple failed to build a viable 5G modem for the latest iPhone while Huawei did it, showing that analog chip design (way more complex than CPU design) should not be underestimated. Apparently BW filters (a component used in 5G modems) aren't trivial either, with very few suppliers in the world. Existing sattelite phones has clunky antennas but the one by Huawei can't even be seen. And it looks like Huawei innovated heavily in heat dissipation technology, allowing its latest smartphone to perform competitively with other flagship phones despite the chip generating more heat due to bigger process node.

The list goes on. Just focusing on nanometers and litography is really a shallow view of what's going on.